ABSTRACT
In the humanities classroom, it is not uncommon for those of us who teach ideologically-motivated topics (e.g. race, class, gender, environment) to struggle to reach those students who feel we are overreaching when we conduct close readings of texts that do not overtly represent such topics. When it comes to the ideologically complex topic of climate change, I have found speculative (or science fiction) films particularly useful for reaching students because this genre lends itself readily to ideological interpretation and the ecological motifs and subtexts in such films force students to reconsider their understandings of the relationship between fictional representations of the world and the world itself. As I will discuss in this chapter, I devote considerable time to helping students understand how key concepts like landscape and setting operate in these films because I have found that for film majors and non-majors alike it is only when students have a clear understanding of the language of film studies that they are then able to progress to the more complex move of grounding their readings of texts within ideological (i.e. ecocritical) concepts. For film students and scholars, key vocabulary terms like mise en scène, cinematography, and editing are crucial to understanding how and why filmmakers choose to represent climate change cinematically. By grounding the teaching of speculative texts in the concrete language of landscape and setting, students can become less resistant to ecocriticism because they can more easily see and hear what might not at first be apparent in these films, particularly in fictional films. While I do teach documentary films in my ecocinema courses, I have found that
since climate change education is generally associated with documentary films I have a vested interest as a film studies instructor in helping students navigate the representations of this global sociopolitical topic in fictional narrative films. In a recent essay, Alexa Weik von Mossner demonstrates how documentary films and fictional films portraying environmental issues employ similar techniques to engage viewers but ultimately differ in the degree to which they appeal emotionally and intellectually to viewers (von Mossner 2014b, 42-45). When students make the intellectual move of recovering or discovering aspects of real-world concerns within fiction, they are doing the kind of intellectual heavy lifting central to ecocriticism. The increasing popularity of “cli-fi” (i.e. climate change fiction), a term coined by the journalist Dan Bloom in 2008 to describe the emerging genre of literature and film that overtly represents climate change, has also given me a
reason to help students learn to see and hear climate change in more covert representations as well (Holmes 2014). Proponents of cli-fi are right to assert the need for direct representations of global warming but, as I have often seen on the CliFi Central Facebook group page, a strict adherence to the supposed “rules” of the genre has led some to be too dismissive of films and novels that represent the issue indirectly. Of the two films I discuss in this chapter, Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012) presents a fairly overt representation of the issue while Blade Runner (1982) addresses it more subtly. By spreading these films out across the term and using setting and landscape to create a common conceptual ground between them, I am actively working to help students analyze how climate change has infiltrated our cultural artifacts in ways that are deeper and arguably more complex than one might consider if looking only at climate change documentaries and cli-fi.
